Re: Hugh Ross's flat prediction

George Murphy commented

> This is just one part of Hugh's overemphasis on the anthropic principle.
> He
> isn't content with the general argument but thinks that it can be
> strengthened by piling
> up a lot of "one chance in ten to the big number" claims. RTB made the
> argument about
> Mars being seeded from earth several years ago when McKay et al made their
> claims about
> past Martian life.

His improbability seems to get larger and larger with years. In his earlier
books, I think it was 10^99 or so. The major argument against the
_abundance_of intelligent life AND _long-term-survival_ in the rest of
the universe is simply put "well...., where are they?". But the reasons
why we have neither seen nor hear from other (possible) life in the universe
can be manifold.

Glenn has preached about "energy" numerous times, and that may be
one reason why the cosmos is silent. There may be an abundance of
bacteria and possibly roaches throughout the universe, but an
"intelligence" we can communicate and develop a relationship with
may have fallen into as much folly as our own politics, wars and
struggles to survive. We have managed to fill the airwaves for little
more than a century, and most of that has been in the latter half of
the 20th century.

If in our own folly, we succeed in destroying ourselves we may be
yet one more "statistic". So clearly, a key here is "survival" and I
think this is really taken for granted in many discussions. We assume
that we will simply go on. Is our future one of "a boot stamping on a
human face" or is it "to become disciples of Christ"? Perhaps our real
gift for survival lies in knowing that God gave his only son so we
could become like him. It was probably one thing that helped carry
us between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance.

I have often wondered about Hugh Ross' comment about the pollens
etc being ejected from the earth and eventually reaching Mars or
possibly as far as Jupiter. I think it is an "interesting" argument,
but what I have not seen is any calculations on this. One issues is
how much pollen is ejected over the 3.5 billion years life has been
here. Another question is how likely it is that the pollen would survive
the intense radiation and vacuum in interplanetary space. There would
also be a problem with sufficient atmosphere, water, nutrients and other
environmental factors on the host planet. Finally, there is the issue of
time, because Mars was not blessed with much time, if it ever did have
any real life. So propagation from earth would have had to have been
several billion years ago.

I sense the implications of his argument is
that if we find amino acids, the argument is that they came from earth.
It's not a facile argument and it probably would be important to determine
whether any purported life on Mars was actually "extra-Martian", but it
seems hard to estimate the odds for such an issue. In a way, it is an
inverted panspermia argument.

by Grace alone we proceed,
Wayne
Received on Fri Mar 26 20:16:21 2004